Document Type
Article
Publication Title
The Florida Entomologist
Publication Date
Spring 3-1986
Abstract
Males' incentives for providing benefits to females and/or their offspring are ambiguous during the period prior to zygote formation. The benefits may function to increase the number of available eggs fertilized by a male and/or enhance the production and survival of his offspring. In some cases, male prezygotic investment may be an adaptation to secure fertilizations despite the fact that it incidentally benefits the female or her offspring. More often, the benefits to offspring production and survival are not simply incidental and probably account, in part, for the magnitude of the male investment. Regardless of the adaptive significance of male provided benefits, they typically reduce the females' costs of producing surviving offspring while raising the males' costs. The extent to which provisioning of benefits increases males' costs and decreases females' costs will affect the degree to which females limit male reproduction (or vice versa). If male-provided benefits (prezygotic or otherwise) are more costly than female costs of offspring production, reproductively-ready males will act as resources limiting female reproduction. From an evolutionary perspective it is important to consider the effect of male-provided benefits. The primary function of the investment (e.g., to maximize sperm transfer) is irrelevant in terms of the degree to which one sex limits the other's reproduction.
Funding Source
The Florida Entomological Society and the University of Oklahoma Zoology Department and Graduate College provided travel funds so that one of us (JSQ) could present the oral version of this paper.
Recommended Citation
Quinn, James S., and Scott K. Sakaluk. “Prezygotic Male Reproductive Effort in Insects: Why Do Males Provide More than Sperm.” The Florida Entomologist 69, no. 1 (1986): 84–94. https://doi.org/10.2307/3494747.
DOI
10.2307/3494747
Comments
First published in The Florida Entomologist (1986): https://doi.org/10.2307/3494747
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).